Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One

by Zev Chafets

  Having diagnosed the problem, Limbaugh went on to the solution. “The blueprint for landslide conservative victory is right there,” he said. It was Reaganism. It frustrated him that the Republican moderates didn’t see this, or care. “Why in the hell do the smartest people in our room want to chuck it? I know why. I know exactly why. It’s because they’re embarrassed by some of the people who call themselves conservatives. These people in New York and Washington, cocktail elitists, they get made fun of when the next NASCAR race is on TV and their cocktail buds come up to them [and say]: ‘These people are in your party?’

  “Conservatism is a universal set of core principles. You don’t check principles at the door . . . Beware of those different factions who seek as part of their attempt to redefine conservatism, as making sure the liberals like us, making sure that the media likes us. They never will, as long as we remain conservatives. They can’t possibly like us; they’re our enemy. In a political arena of ideas, they’re our enemy. They think we need to be defeated!”

  The CPAC audience cheered and cheered. This was what they wanted, full-on defiance and resistance to the wave of liberalism that had left them disoriented since November. Rush wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t already know (many of them had learned it from him in the first place). They were applauding his clarity and his certainty.

  The adoration got to Limbaugh. His speech was scheduled for thirty minutes, but he wouldn’t stop, and he went on for nearly an hour over the allotted time. Later he told me that the organizers of the event asked him to continue, but his own sense of timing should have told him he had gone on much too long. In the studio he is a master of control and timing, but today he rambled. The people around me began sneaking looks at their watches. We were getting very close to dinnertime. Limbaugh finally concluded the speech, accepted his award, went directly from the ballroom to the airport, and flew back to Palm Beach, where he had left a houseful of weekend guests. He had done what he had come to do—rally the troops, cement his role as the leader of the conservative movement, and keep the media fixated on him. His plane wasn’t even in the air when Bill Schneider, CNN’s political analyst, said that Limbaugh had “crossed a line” by reiterating his hope that Obama failed and described the speech as “sinister.”

  It was just the first in a loud chorus of media indignation occasioned by Limbaugh’s CPAC performance. But the White House was pleased. They still thought there was political gain in putting Limbaugh’s face on the GOP. “Rush Limbaugh is the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party,” Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said the following morning on Face the Nation. “Do you really think he is that important, that other Republicans are paying that much attention to him?” asked host Bob Schieffer.

  “Well,” said Emanuel, “he was given the keynote, basically, at the Conservative Conference, to speak . . . I do think he’s an intellectual force, which is why the Republicans pay such attention to him.”

  That night, RNC Chairman Michael Steele, a black Maryland lawyer, went on D. L. Hughley’s short-lived CNN interview program. Hughley is a comedian and former gang banger, a Blood so fearsome—according to himself—that his nickname was “Lil Rock.” Steele, who fenced in college, was clearly intimidated by such enormous street cred. When Hughley said that the Republican National Convention “literally looked like Nazi Germany,” Steele remained silent. But when Hughley referred to Limbaugh as a “clown” and “the head of the Republican Party,” Steele spoke up.

  “No he’s not,” said Steele. “I’m the de facto head of the Republican Party—”

  Hughley said he was happy to hear that, because he had heard Limbaugh say that he wanted Obama to fail.

  “Let’s put it into context here,” said Steele. “Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh, the whole thing is entertainment. Yes, it’s incendiary; yes, it’s ugly.”

  The next day, on his first show since CPAC, Limbaugh had a few words for the chairman of his party. “Okay, so I am an entertainer, and I have twenty-two million listeners because of my great song-and-dance routines. . . . Michael Steele, you are head of the RNC. You are not head of the Republican Party. Tens of millions of conservatives and Republicans have nothing to do with the RNC, and right now they want nothing to do with it, and when you call them asking them for money, they hang up on you. . . .”

  Limbaugh didn’t say how he knew this. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t reporting on the party’s fundraising; he was threatening it. “If we don’t want Obama and Reid and Pelosi to fail, then why does the RNC exist, Mr. Steele? Why are you even raising money? What do you want from us?” He went on to say that he had personally campaigned for Steele when he ran for governor of Maryland and that Steele was now stabbing him in the back. Knives were on his mind. “If I were chairman of the Republican Party, given the state that it’s in, I would quit. I might get out the hari-kari knife because I would have presided over a failure that is embarrassing to the Republicans and conservatives who have supported it and invested in it all these years . . .”

  It took less than one hour for Michael Steele to do what Congressman Phil Gingrey had done: crawl. “My intent was not to go after Rush,” he told Mike Allen of Politico. “I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh. I was maybe a bit inarticulate . . . There are those out there who want to look at what he’s saying as incendiary and divisive and ugly, that is what I was trying to say. There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership . . .”

  Limbaugh was now clearly the biggest elephant in the country. Robert Gibbs, the president’s spokesman, used the White House briefings to attack him day after day, alternately bemoaning his political obstruction and belittling him as merely a radio broadcaster trying to improve his ratings and make some money. Limbaugh laughingly pleaded guilty on every count. At one point, pro-Obama journalists in the press corps anxiously asked Gibbs if he wasn’t making a mistake by paying too much attention to Limbaugh.

  That, however, remained the Democratic strategy. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post reported that Obama people were going around town bragging about how they had lured the Republicans into a trap. “The White House has decided to run against Rush Limbaugh,” he wrote in a long article. It wasn’t exactly a scoop. Democratic strategist James Carville bragged about it on TV (Carville is married to Republican strategist Mary Matalin, one of Limbaugh’s best friends; they were among a handful of guests at Limbaugh’s third marriage), and Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, published an anti-Limbaugh op-ed in the Washington Post.

  Limbaugh had become a full-fledged media obsession. Saturday Night Live did skits about him. A New Yorker cover depicted eight Limbaugh-faced infants squalling. David Letterman joked about how awful Limbaugh had looked at CPAC and asked his guest, CBS news anchor Katie Couric, what she made of “this bonehead, Rush Limbaugh.” Couric passed with a girlish “Dave! Don’t do this to me.”

  “Every time you turn on the TV you see something about Rush Limbaugh,” said James Carville, on TV.

  Limbaugh, as usual, kept coming. They wanted to make him out to be the leader of the Republican Party? Great! Reductio ad absurdum was his game. As the “titular head of the Republican Party” he challenged President Obama to a one-on-one debate, graciously offering to send the EIB One to transport the president to the event. It would, Limbaugh explained, save taxpayers money. Needless to say, Obama did not re spond.

  Susan Estrich, who managed the 1988 Dukakis campaign, warned her fellow liberals, as Tina Brown had several weeks earlier, that they were being too clever by half. Limbaugh, she said, is not encumbered by the practical constraints and duties of real politicians, very much including the president. “Trying to beat him at his own game when your own game is played by a different set of rules is a losing proposition. He knows that,” she wrote. It was smart advice, but Obama’s strategists were not inclined to accept counsel from one of the masterminds of the Dukakis campaign.

 
Limbaugh assured his listeners that he was happy to be fighting the White House. “I was made for this. I was built for this,” he said. “I admit if this were happening my first year behind this microphone, I would probably be a little panicked and I’d be backing off and I’m sure my broadcast partners would say, ‘Ooooh, maybe gotta back away here, a little bit too out front there, blah, blah’ . . . But don’t worry, it’s not my first time.” Limbaugh admitted that the people close to him were concerned about the beat of criticism coming from the Oval Office and the Democratic leaders in Congress. He said that he considered it a teachable moment.

  After CPAC, Limbaugh found himself fighting on several fronts. Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter wrote that Limbaugh was destroying the Republican Party and that his actual influence in the country was on the decline. New York Times blogger Timothy Egan wrote that “smarter Republicans know [Limbaugh] is not good for them.” He quoted David Frum, who had been a Bush speechwriter: “If you’re a talk radio host and you have five million who listen and there are fifty million who hate you, you make a nice living. If you’re a Republican Party, you’re marginalized.” Limbaugh laughed at such criticism. Since when, he asked, did liberal columnists like Alter and Egan worry about the health of the Republican Party? “They only attack those they fear,” he said.

  Newsweek was in the process of remaking itself into a left-of-center magazine of opinion, and it assigned Frum to write a cover story entitled “Why Rush is Wrong.”

  “With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word—we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time . . . Rush is to Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s.”

  Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, fired back: “I find the attacks on Rush from the right mostly stupid. . . . Rush is a huge benefit to the Right, and if we didn’t have him, we’d have to try to invent him (and probably fail, because so much of his success is a product of his natural, can’t-be-reproduced talent).”

  Only one aspect of the torrent of criticism of his CPAC speech actually got to Limbaugh—the comments about his physical appearance. “Personal bulk” was comparatively kind. Timothy Egan called him “a swollen man.” Begala mocked his “bloated face.” MSNBC’s Ed Schultz invited Limbaugh on his show this way: “C’mon, you fat pig. Let’s get it on.” David Letterman joked that the way he was dressed made him look like a European gangster.

  Rusty Limbaugh had been a tubby kid, and Rush, in his various adult iterations, has been a fat man. At CPAC he weighed 290 pounds. “I dressed for comfort because I was overweight,” he wrote me in May, “I did not want a closed collar and tie because I did not want to sweat. I did not intend to attract attention or comment with my attire. I wanted to be comfortable and not be distracted by how I felt based on my attire. Those of us who are overweight do NOT ever think of making fashion statements, nor do we believe our attire will ever be mentioned one way or another. I was surprised my attire drew attention. I have never relied on looks to contribute to my ‘image.’ I have never tried to project an image. My mind does not operate that way. I rely on, and hope my ideas, my substance, speak for me, not the superficiality of appearance.” He also started losing weight, but no diet was going to make him less visible.

  In the first week of March, Pew reported that Limbaugh stories amounted to 8 percent of all the news stories in the national media organizations it monitors. White House reporters once again queried Gibbs on the efficacy of the strategy, and this time Gibbs conceded that it might be counterproductive. But ten days later, after Dick Cheney said that Obama was “making some choices that, in my mind, will in fact raise the risk to the American people,” Gibbs tossed another Rush bomb. “I guess Rush Limbaugh was busy, so they trotted out the next most popular member of the Republican cabal.” The Democratic National Committee announced an Internet contest to pick a national slogan to use against Limbaugh in a billboard campaign.

  Vanity Fair media critic Michael Wolff marveled at the centrality of Limbaugh. A year ago, he and his fellow media mavens had written him off as a dead man talking. Now he was not only back but bigger than ever. Wolff was perplexed by this. AM radio was a dying medium, a dinosaur even when Limbaugh began to broadcast twenty years earlier. Now, on the Internet, how could one man with a microphone dominate the debate so thoroughly? “The only sensible market view of conservative talk is that it will contract and be reduced, in the coming years, to a much more rarefied format. And yet, by the end of Rush Limbaugh’s fractious month of calculated outrage, his audience was back up to 20 million. That’s showmanship.”

  When would Limbaugh peak? On March 26, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie told Joe Scarborough that Limbaugh was in decline. “People here recognize that argument only goes so far. So notice the last few weeks we haven’t heard too much about Rush Limbaugh.”

  Rush jumped on it. “Savannah,” he said in his most patronizing tone, “let me just read to you what we have just received.” He then recited his latest ratings. His show was number one in its time slot in New York; Chicago; Los Angeles; Houston; Washington, D.C.; and Detroit, and second in San Francisco. The numbers were up, sometimes sharply, all across the country. The pro-Limbaugh Web site Radio Equalizer asked, “Given this blockbuster data, will the White House think twice before targeting Rush again?”

  A lot of Democrats now agreed, and the attacks on Limbaugh tapered off briefly. But he was too hot to quench. Colin Powell, former secretary of State under George W. Bush and one of the leading Republican moderates Limbaugh had scored at CPAC, went on Fareed Zakaria’s show and took a shot at Limbaugh. “I think the party has to stop shouting at the world, at the country,” he said. “I’ve talked to a number of leaders in recent weeks and they understand that.” Powell went on to quote columnist Mort Kondracke on Limbaugh’s unfitness to act as party spokesman because of his appeal to peoples’ “lesser instincts.”

  Limbaugh responded the following day by telling his audience that Powell was still angry because Powell had endorsed Obama during the 2008 campaign, and Rush explained it as Powell putting racial solidarity over his party and his friend, McCain.

  “So, General Powell, let me explain something. The fact is, Republicans did not listen to me. They listened to you. They have not been listening to me for years. The Republican Party nominated your ideal candidate. They nominated a moderate who’s willing to buy into an endless array of liberal causes . . .”

  Round two of Powell-Limbaugh started in May, on Face the Nation. Dick Cheney was asked who was a better Republican, Limbaugh or Powell. “If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I’d go with Rush Limbaugh,” the former vice president replied. “My take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican.”

  A few days later, Powell delivered a speech to a crowd of business leaders in Boston. “Rush Limbaugh says, ‘Get out of the Republican Party.’ Dick Cheney says, ‘He’s already out.’ I may be out of their version of the Republican Party, but there’s another version of the Republican Party waiting to emerge once again,” Powell said.

  Limbaugh was palpably bored by the controversy. He had made his point—Powell was an Obama Democrat and a political nonentity, and it was now time to turn the whole thing into a joke. With mock seriousness he announced that he was resigning from the position of “titular head of the Republican Party” that had been bestowed upon him by President Obama and the media. “There, frankly, is someone far more qualified and capable and more in tune with today’s Republican Party than I, to be not only its titular head but its real head, and that would be General Colin Powell. So I now pass the baton to General Powell. . . . I now today pronounce and proclaim General
Colin Powell as the titular head of the Republican Party. From now on out, those of you who want to know what the party should do to win elections, to beat back the onslaught of Obama-ism, ask General Powell.”

  A few weeks later, USA Today-Gallup published the results of a poll question: Who is the main person who speaks for the Republican Party? Limbaugh finished first, with 13 percent, followed by Cheney, at 10 percent. McCain and Newt Gingrich tied for third at 6 percent. Among Republicans only, Limbaugh and Gingrich tied at 10 percent. George W. Bush got less than half a percentage point. Colin Powell wasn’t even mentioned.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE MAGIC NEGRO

  Rush Limbaugh’s “I hope he fails” stance toward President Obama and his skirmishing with Powell over the nature of the party were bound to embroil Rush in charges of racism. He wasn’t surprised. When Obama first appeared as a viable Democratic candidate, Limbaugh saw that a great many moderate Republicans would be wary of taking on an attractive, charming, soft-spoken, intellectually gifted, young black candidate. The idea of voting for an African American was attractive; nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of history. Besides, it would be dangerous to stand against Obama. In the course of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic primary campaign against Obama even Bill Clinton, the darling of black America, a man whom author Toni Morrison famously called “our first black president,” was accused by the Obama camp of playing the white race card. In a different climate such a bogus charge would have been hooted down by the press corps, but in the campaign of 2008, mainstream reporters functioned as Obama bodyguards. Playing a role in the victory of the first African American president was a thrilling personal and professional opportunity, and the media seized it with undisguised enthusiasm. Limbaugh, of course, did not. He was a conservative and a Republican, Obama a liberal and a Democrat. Of course he would take on the Democratic candidate. That was his job.